I'd say it's a good amount to play. There were certainly some fun ones, some good ones and some funny ones. And that's what we want.

I feel like the game we made fits in with the rest of the experience.

Enjoy my gameplay of ArachnoNinja and Those Who Die Like Cattle. I should have more VODs to uploading every couple days. Do not forget to checkout the entries in the description or below the video link :heart: (and like my vid :wink:)

https://youtu.be/MOQvnWwS2QI

ArachnoNinja: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/arachnoninja

Those Who Die Like Cattle: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/those-who-die-like-cattle

Last chance to rate: CellSpace cellular automata sandbox and Cellspace IDE (postcompo version).

With the postcompo IDE you can create full games and share them easily. You can now share games that open in the IDE. I created 4 more example games, play and edit them via the links below.

My LD entry contains basic instructions

Some example rules explained in this post

Play and edit the example games

Douse the Fires - click to remove walls

Platform game - you cannot jump, fall onto the monsters to kill them

Escape Room - push the keys to unlock the locks

Tanks - destroy the tanks with fire

Boulderdash - get all the diamonds

Harvey Wallbangers - draw walls to make the wallbangers get the potions

Cell Pacman

Shooter - space to shoot

Last day of rating begins and we are still looking for more employees in our Head'quarters!

Apply here!

Like I did for Ludum Dare 55,

I'll soon be posting a video talking about our games development!

Be sure to keep an eye out for that on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HelperWesley

Also, we took some time to update/fix the game and launched the new version on Newgrounds.

Check it out here: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/952914

If you have the chance, please check out the game and rate it. Our little ghostly friends would love some company and the house owners would hate to find their house in disarray! Dive into the chaos, brew some potions and get ready to hunt possessed furniture and silence talking pumpkins.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/haunted-house-sitter

If you leave your game in the comments, I will have a look at it as well!

I just realized, a day before rating ends, that we never actually published our game as a Gam Jam game :cry: It was always just unfinished... And I was wondering why we didn't get any type of ratings or comments

Hey everyone! As the jam comes to a close I just wanted to say go try out our game! We have absolutely loved seeing all of the amazing comments and other jam games during the jam so thanks for the awesome time! Play now: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/critter-gang!

I will post from time to time now games that are in danger zone from person i know or which seems very interesting :)

Tiny Creatures by geckoo1337

This games needs only 2-3 votes! So go play it.

Play it here

Less than 24 hours left in the jam, one week till Halloween, and only one night to survive. There is an infestation of Poppets and you are the only one who can stop them!

CALLING ALL SCORE CHASERS!!

Think you’ve got what it takes to be the best? So far, only one streamer has managed to survive the night. @deadroach, the legendary Poppet King, who took down 6 Poppets! Do you have the skills to beat their record? The challenge is on! How many Poppets can YOU kill in one night?

Play Poppet now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8CYP_9laTc

COMMENT AND WE WILL RATE YOUR GAME!!!!!!!!!!

Blobs are cute, only game hard.

Yes, the game is stressful.. cute and hard and stressful.

There is timer to make it more stressful, we hope you like it.

Get golden blobs, it's even harder. (Better than brown blobs, and more cute)

(We nerfed this game multiple times already. Play version 1.2 or in the browser, it's easier now)

Play blobs. Blobs squishy.

(This is our last post before the rating ends. We don't want to spam the feed section because some games might really need it to escape danger zone. Good luck everyone!)

Check out more effort posts here:

• Tutorial to 2D shaders in Godot
• Changelog for version 1.1
• Changelog for version 1.2

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/microbe-mayhem We have put a lot of effort into creating a game that fits the theme of GameJam this time. The game process is relatively complete, and we hope that great game developers can give us a rating. Thanks ,love you!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/lil-chimeras Hey jammers. I'm pitching myself out here in hopes of getting enough ratings. Was my first compo game and while rough, was a great experience. Looking to have enough ratings to place so I have a metric to compare myself against next Ludum Dare. Leave a comment and I'll check yours out in return.

Have a great weekend.

Participating in Ludum Dare 56 was a blast! Thanks to everyone who participated and those who took the time to review and leave feedback! I just wanted to share my experiences, what I learned and what went well and not along the way.

Results - What I Made

Gettin' Squirrely

A game about being a squirrel, climbing on trees, jumping around collecting nuts and delivering them to your nut stash.

Moving and Collecting nuts

Climbing trees!

Delivering nuts and a fun speedy jump move

oh, and your cheeks fill up with nuts!

the game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/get-squirrelly/

The process

At the onset of the theme announcement I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Many of the ideas that came up during brainstorming felt very complex and difficult to implement. Eventually I realized I was overthinking it and I decided it was best to follow my initial gut intinct. Outside my office window on my neighbor's house a squirrel is usually hanging out on the roof, its cheeks stuffed with nuts. I thought it would be good fun to make a game with climbing and snappy jump mechanics, and a simple game loop of gathering nuts and stashing them to score. Climbing on trees was a key differentiating feature that I thought could be really fun if I could pull it off.

I specifically was interested in creating a Unity 3D game because I wanted to exercise new skills in rapid modeling, shaders, and animation techniques. I had never worked with animating quadrupeds previously, only humanoids, so LD was a great excuse to dive into it. This also meant that I had to have a very regimented project and time management strategy to limit the time investment into each mechanic, concept prototype, and asset.

I created Gettin' Squirrely solo, which has been how all game jams have been for me in the past. I know that I could improve in my networking skills as I've never been asked to join or had any luck with attracting others to join my project. I'll admit part of this could be my own apprehension of leading other people that have studio experience making me anxious about it. I seriously considered just being a "fly on the wall" for a team in the jam just to immerse myself in the experience of creating a game with others as I have only ever worked on games solo, never with other professional creators.

I didn't get sound completed in the game, even though I have a deep background in audio production. I have worked in recording studios in the past and have professional recording equipment at my home to use. It just didn't happen due to lack of sleep, and in that moment I decided to cut audio from the initial Jam release and add it in later.

Posting the game to the Ludum Dare site as an embedded web player highlighted a an oversight in my plan. When attempting to build the web version the shader variants for the trees were so generic that they had thousands of variants to compile which after 20+ minutes I realized would not complete by the deadline. I had to scramble to resolve that issue and modify shader code to reduce the variants. Building earlier in the prototyping phase would have exposed this issue much sooner.

Later I recorded "Foley" sounds for every sound effect using condenser microphones, including barks from my dog, nuts cracking and dropping, foliage moving, and sounds of squirrels screeching in my yard. I created and recorded a song that is now forever stuck in my head for better or worse. I added sound to the game in an update posted to Itch.io, not included in the LD jam version. Other bug fixes and improvements based on feedback were made and more improvements and enhancements are in the works.

What Worked

• Building the game for Linux and getting it running on a Steam Deck made me about fall out of my seat in excitement. Nothing compared to that feeling - I was totally floored!
• Taking care of myself - Having lots of good snacks and beverages available, taking breaks, walking the dog and sharing progress with friends. I still remember looking forward to the scheduled "Tasty Burger" lunch I planned on Saturday.
• Trusting my development instincts and skills to create and learn what was needed to quickly complete a feature on the fly.
• Rapid prototyping - specifically creating each prototype with a question to answer, cutting features by honest evaluation. Focusing on the core movement first, and informing design with each prototype
• User Interface design felt easy and automatic, with very little time investment.
• Gamepad support just worked, I never tested it until submission time. Using Unity's Input System and configuring the inputs generically it worked out of the box.
• Simple and effective Visual Effects and Post-processing "juice". By adding camera shake, motion blur, trail effects during jumps, and impact effects when jumping and landing added a lot to the game feel.
• Almost every bit of feedback I received was highly positive about the "fun" of the game, and many constructive comments which helped drive bug fixes and other improvements.
• Vector and Rotational projections to calculate climbing and jumping were used liberally. I recently became much more comfortable with these concepts through learning shaders and this was a huge boost to creating the mechanics.
• Custom collision and physics. I did not use Rigidbodies for movement or collision. The jump routines and movement all utilized custom collision and overlap checks. I had never done fully custom collision and physics this way before. This provided greater control of all the movement, and made jumping onto trees and immediately attaching to the surface possible. The only Rigid bodies used in the entire game were for the nuts that sometimes fall from the trees.
• Focusing on simplicity and the core gameplay loop. Keeping things as simple as possible and "following the fun" without reservations or FOMO for more complexity (complexity does not mean depth).
• Creating an itch.io page, rigging up all the analytics, screen shots, creating devlog updates. Still room for improvement but it was good practice.

What Needed Improvement

• Need more connection and community involvement with other game developers. I am not an introvert but my entire game development experience has been in a vacuum - solo.
• Build early and often - compiling the build early would have exposed many issues that could have been avoided.
• Camera controls - despite being "Squirrely" the camera movement was jerky and sometimes called out as "tank controls". This was even more disorienting on trees, but this type of camera movement was a compromise as it helped with allowing the player to see their squirrel more easily when on the tree. The mistake was using the newest bleeding edge Unity which has the new Cinemachine package which changed the layout of all of the components, so time was spent familiarizing myself with the new system that could have been spent just creating with the system I already knew well.
• Dog AI - the dog was intended to be the primary balance to make being on the ground dangerous. The dog's AI was not aggressive enough to locate the player, and was never a real threat. The dog had some animation issues related to basing the animation transitions on the Nav Mesh Agent's desired velocity instead of it's current velocity. This was patched later but was not in the LD jam version.
• Collision - Many different raycasts are needed to make detecting the character orientation to achieve predictable climbing on the tree and avoid randomly dropping off of the tree during movement. One particularly difficult part of this was that the tree collision mesh included the leaves, and this caused some fighting between the raycasts. Learned that by separating the leaves to a non-collidable tree instance alleviated this issue, and some transition animations were needed to make sure that attachment to the tree would be reliable. This was improved in later version.
• Indecision / Analysis paralysis - Not enough trust in my own ideas during ideation. Initially during brainstorming I solicited ideas from community and friends then became a bit loaded down feeling like my own ideas were not "good enough". This made me feel a bit deflated, so the first night of the jam I did not make much progress. Once I made an executive decision picking a theme, progress came quickly.

Plans for the future

I would like to bring the game to Steam, and hope to do so soon and will be looking to engage with others with more experience in doing that. I have many ideas including new game modes, characters, and stages to introduce. Primarily I want to get more familiar with the entire launch process and build my portfolio. I would really like to engage more with and explore community and feedback driven development, but it has become more clear that I need to network and build community first to be in a position to do that.

My team made an idle game, if you enjoy idle games try it out :3 :tropicalfish: :blueheart:

Play Here!

If anyone needs a last minute play and rate, reply to this post and I'll play your game! :3

There's finally a post jam demo build up for my game Particle Wars. Unfortunately there's only a windows version as of now. Any feedback/suggestions are welcomed, and needed so please give it a try :)

And a huge thanks to all of you who've played and rated my game, it's been a blast!

Itch: https://nickhellquist.itch.io/particle-wars-survive-demo

What's next for Miku's Minion Madness? (Playable here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness)

Well, lots of stuff! We've been working hard at a post-jam version for Miku's Minion Madness, and here's a quick sneak peek!

We've been working on updating the UI and creating new cards. We are also working on using images for creatures, instead of just vague shapes:

These updates haven't been released yet and absolutely are just part of the upcoming update so keep an eye open - they're coming to itch.io at some point in the not so distant future!

Small Problems to Grapple With it's a grappling hook platformer where you play as a tiny frog trying to escape from the flood and avoid enemies. The goal is to get a high score

if you haven't checked it out yet you can try it here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/small-problems-to-grapple-with

Hi guys I am hidden61ade!, getting myself in the field of gamedev for just a straight year since LD54 and a participant of LD54 and 56. This post is for reflecting my stories with LD (and perhaps getting some more ratings for my ld56 game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/night-at-the-8th-warehouse ((()

As you might have noticed, LD is the very key element of me entering the field of game development. For LD54, the game club in my school, CUHKSZ Game Odyssey, held a lecture about Unity engine and promoted LD as a bonus and held an onsite grouping session, it was then that I teamed together with some awesome and really nice people like @madoka @fan @nanamaki @kuchinashi and @the-iaald. As a complete beginner to game design or development, on LD54, I acted as a scripter and even got myself a task of embedding the SFX and music. However, when trying to use Wwise for the embedding and to cope with Unity's version control PLasticSCM, they conflicted on the final merge so yeah basically I f**cked up on this part when the game was submitted (though fixed later). But this as my first hand-on experience on gamedev is very valuable since I learned a lot from my awesome teammates and hey, the core gameplay of that game is from my idea!! Receiving many likes from the comments about the scripts I wrote and having a decent ranking at the end is also very satisfying.!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/space-bar-porter-qq

One year later and during this year I have got myself into some other gamejams and even a complete game design & development competition that is national-wide and big title sponsors like Hypergraph and Paradox Interactive, together with my LD team, we won a major prize. With such experiences added, again in the Unity lecture of my game club, this time I am the lecturer teaching others about what is LD and why we should all try our best participating it. Also, for LD56, I am the leader of my team and also the multi-tasker responsible for programming , game design, scripting and also teaching the rookies all the way through--from them I saw the shadows of myself on the last year. The complexity and content of this game is also way more finished than my LD54 game. Creating a game is already cool enough, but leading it is more satisfying, teaching rookies into this industries makes it way more meaningful.

Though facing some sort of harsh comments, I can still fill the warmth and passion of the Gamedev society of LD, and it is the pure Gamedev spirit that makes me fall in love with LD. I will definitely do LDjamming more in the future.

So yeah enough talking, please come and try our stealth-(horror)-platformer Night at the 8th Warehouse!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/night-at-the-8th-warehouse